Reputed Ontario Mafia Boss Dies at Age 93

Daniel Gasbarrini married the daughter of Tony Sylvestro, one of three Mafia dons who took over loansharking, gambling and narcotics across southern Ontario after Rocco Perri disappeared and his lieutenants were murdered.

[Gasbarrini held a] lifelong relationship... with Mafia boss Johnny Papalia. The pair went to school together in the North End, their fathers had similar criminal pasts, and the two forged a friendship.

That friendship included opening an illegal gambling house, The Porcupine Miners Club, with Papalia on John Street, two blocks from police headquarters shortly after Gasbarrini was released from prison in 1955. (It lasted for two years before the police "stopped looking the other way," Gasbarrini remembered.)

Keep alive a lifelong friendship with a man convicted in the infamous French Connection heroin smuggling plot, a man known for drug smuggling, gambling rackets, extortion, and even murder, and people will talk.

And talk they did. There was the 1963 testimony at the U.S. Senate crime investigations subcommittee hearing that identified Gasbarrini as father-in-law Sylvestro's likely successor and named him a key member of Canadian organized crime.

Back in Canada, he was identified as a suspected member of organized crime at the 1964 Ontario Police Commission hearings. Six years later, he was called "a kingpin in the Mafia in this country" by Ontario MPP Mort Shulman in a speech that led to a judicial inquiry. That inquiry probed connections between Gasbarrini, Papalia, Burlington businessman Clinton Duke, and senior Ontario Provincial Police officers....

DOMINICK CICALE, A FORMER CAPO IN THE BONANNO CRIME FAMILY, ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS
In 1999, Bronx-based Dominick Cicale finished his second years-long bit and hooked up with Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, then an up-and-coming member of the Bronx faction of the Bonanno crime family.

Initially he'd been closely affiliated with "Big Ernie" in the Genovese family.

You've heard of On the Waterfront? This guy apparently owned it.... Well, huge swaths of it, anyway..... Reputed Genovese soldier Salvatore (Sallie) DeMeo, 77, was busted on tax-evasion charges this past Thursday for failing to report $2 million in capital gains income and not ponying up about $367,000 in taxes.

However, it's not mob-related, the Feds say. The mob-related stuff was last month. DeMeo got off in September with five years' probation. In Brooklyn Supreme Court he copped to participating in a loansharking and gambling racket.

Peter "Peter Pasta" Pellegrino, formerly of the Babylon, New York, restaurant known as Peter’s Italian Restaurant, really is -- or was -- a gangster.

The once-promising Bonanno member who appeared after the Kitchen Nightmares episode aired, now calls himself a brokester. And the Bonanno crime family, with which he was once affiliated has disowned him.

So has the rest of New York's Cosa Nostra, according to FBI documents and Peter Pasta himself.

But before all that he appeared on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares in which he acted very much like the mobster he allegedly was trying to become around the time of filming. (See Peter's Italian Restaurant menu here.)

Back then Peter Pasta was an up-and-coming Bonanno associate who "earned" $15 grand a week bookmaking.

Formerly known as the Profaci crime family, for its original boss, it only became the Colombo family in the 1960s when family member Joseph Colombo went to the Commission to spill the beans on plans made by Profaci's short-term sucessor in cahoots with Joseph Bonanno of the Bonanno crime family.

Boss Profaci was involved in the crime family's first war, against the upstart Gallo brothers who felt the upper-echelon bosses were taking more than their fair share from the soldiers.